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Saturday, February 19, 2011

having fun, wish they were here

You don't know what an achievement this is, updating my blog from my parents house. Guys...they don't have wireless internet here! It's, like, dial-up modem, with the beeps and boops! Not quite, but still kinda bad. They use AOL to get their e-mail! Like in the 1990s! All this I could have worked around, except that my laptop is a MacBook Air, which does not even have an Ethernet jack, as I guess that would have been like putting pockets on a cocktail dress. Also, because it is the year 2011. There used to be people in surrounding apartments from whom we used to steal internet, but they either moved away or realized that they needed to password protect their networks, so...yeah. Luckily, I am borrowing some weak-ish coverage from some nice guy named WLAN, so I'm going to do this quick while I'm still getting a signal.

(Yes, I know WLAN is not a guy. GOD, guys, it was a JOKE. Nerds.)

So we got into New York yesterday afternoon. On the way in from Laguardia, we stopped by my grandmother's house in Flushing (Flushing: Official Home of the Chinese Grandmother!) and then I had to hustle to my parents' house for a quick shower and change of clothes to say hi to some people at my publisher.

Look, I know that to some degree it must be a job, just like any other job, but can I just tell you that it looks incredibly fun to work in book publishing? Because there are books everywhere! Like, books falling out of the sky! And you can just pick up and read any of them! Also, they had a lot of high-end office supplies; obviously this is the world of the gigantic professional printer in the kingdom of the extra-large padded mailing envelope, and I don't know why I love that so much but I DO. So anyway, I stopped by, we chatted a bit, and then I walked through Midtown to the West Side to meet up with everyone else for dinner.

I won't say too much about the meal because I basically live-Tweeted the thing last night, and probably some of you are going to kill me over that, because some people get very persnickety about their feeds. Sincere apologies for those who don't like me clogging up their tweet stream, but my reasons for live-tweeting were two-fold. First is that one of my partners at work (hi Kim!) told me to take pictures of the meal, SO I DID. Secondly, I had some scheme that I was going to Twitter Guilt executive chef Eric Ripert to come out into the dining room to say hi to us. (Unfortunately, he did not, because he is important. Also, it's possible he wasn't there last night, because from his Twitter feed, it sounded like he went skiing. Either way.)

Today dawned sunny but cold, so we scrapped our plans for riding bikes in the park and just went straight off to the Natural History Museum, where we looked at some dead stuff. Cal was suitably impressed. I always like to seek out the older, unrenovated wings because they look exactly the same as they did when I was a kid and therefore exercise upon me some kind of memory vortex, but mostly we just looked at the whale and the dinosaurs and they were pretty neat.

Cal was still pretty creeped out by the whale and the squid, by the way. He didn't want to go near it at first, though he warmed to it eventually. I tried to get a picture of that exhibit, but it really was still pretty dark and the picture didn't turn out. So instead, just picture some kind of deep-sea horror tableau that will haunt your dreams. There you go.

If I were making this trip with Joe, without the kids, undoubtedly we'd be spending all our time downtown, eating every two hours, window-shopping and people-watching until we passed out from sheer exhaustion. Well, except for maybe one day, which we'd spend all the way up up uptown in Washington Heights, where we could revisit old haunts and eat at Malecon, home of the garlic dipping sauce and on-call 2:00am regret. Being here with a kid sort of pulls the center of gravity towards Central Park, which is fine, but maybe we'll find some time over the next day or two to go below 14th Street. (I know, I know, there's tons of kids stuff down there too, but it's different when you live here versus when you're only in town for two or three days. We have to cluster our activities a little more is all.)

We're having fun, but we really miss Mack and Joe. That's the problem with everyone in our lives being so spread out--wherever you are, you always end up missing someone. When we get home, I'm going to grab Mack and just squeeze the snot out of him.